Practical online marketing tools for small business requires. Your brand needs to be seen often to be

recognized. Without effective online marketing, your target audience isn’t going to know who you are.

 Fortunately, the internet has leveled the playing field when it comes to brand visibility. A small company

can compete with a mega-corporation with the right marketing strategy.  Let’s look at some of the most

useful online marketing tools for small businesses.

Choosing the Right Online Marketing Tools for Small Business

There’s no “one size fits all” set of marketing tools. It will depend on what business you’re in and how you

want to promote yourself to your customers. One company might only sell their products online while another

might do business face-to-face and only use the web to get new leads. No matter how your company operates,

there are a few tools that every innovative small business should have in its arsenal.

Email Service Provider

New technologies come and go all the time, but good, old-fashioned email is still one of the best ways to connect

with your audience. Building an email list should be a top priority for every small business.

With sites like Twitter and Facebook, you’ll always be at the mercy of the company behind the website. If they change

something or decide they don’t like something you’re doing, you can lose access to your followers overnight. With an

email list, you have complete control.

An email service provider is a service that manages your subscribers, sends the emails for you, and tracks things like

open rate and click rate on links in your messages. Some of the most popular options are MailChimp, ConvertKit,

Active Campaign, and Drip.

Keyword Research Tools

Keywords are the building blocks of getting traffic to your website. Every time someone do an online search,

they search for keywords about the topic of their interest.

Whether you’re using paid ads or search engine optimization (SEO) to rank in the organic results, you need to

know what keywords your market is searching for and, more importantly, which of those generate sales.

The highest volume keyword in your market means nothing if those visitors don’t convert.

You may be able to come up with a list of relevant keywords for useful strategy tool in your market of the

top of your head, but if you want to know what terms people are searching for, you need a keyword research tool.

These tools can generate a list of all the relevant keywords, along with the relative search volumes. Some popular

options for keyword tools include Google Keyword Planner, KWFinder, and SEMrush.

Competitive Analysis Tool

Another fundamental piece of a good marketing strategy is competitive intelligence. It will help you find

gaps in your competitors’ strategies where you can step in and dominate as well as show you what they’re

doing to get results in their stronger areas. Once you know what a competitor is doing to rank high in the search

results, sit at the top of the paid ads, or anything else, they’re doing well, and it’s just a matter of doing more of the

same thing than they are. If you can outwork them, you can take over those top rankings for yourself. One of the best

tools for competitive research, especially from an SEO perspective, is Ahrefs.

Social Media Scheduler

Social media should be part of every small business marketing strategy. Precisely what social networks you

should target will depend on your market. Some are more business-oriented, like LinkedIn, while others are

more consumer-based, like Facebook.

Whatever social media platform you focus on, it can take a lot of time to post content and interact with your

audience. Without regular updates, without using useful online marketing tools, you’re not going to stick in

your audience’s minds.

Social media scheduling tools let you queue up all your posts at once and have them “drip” out over several days.

You can set up the entire week’s worth of posts in the morning and let it run hands-free for the rest of the week.

Two of the most effective tools for scheduling your social media messages are HootSuite and the Buffer app.

Marketing Tools

Google has quite a few tools for marketing your small business, most of which are entirely free to use. Some of the

most useful include Google Trends, Google Alerts, and Google Analytics.

Google Trends

The Google Trends tool lets you search for topics related to your market, and it will show you what people are searching

for around that topic. It shows things like interest over time so you can see what time of year interest peaks, interest by

subregion so you can see where the high and low points are lists of related topics, and various other bits of data.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts lets you set up an automated search that will email you whenever Google finds a new web page

or news item about a topic. You can use this to search for information about your competitors, industry news,

and anything else you want to get updates. It is helpful when you use it to search for your business name, product

names, and other such things to see when people are talking about you online.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a stats package to track your website traffic. It will show you what pages are getting the most

traffic, where people are landing on and leaving your website, where your visitors located in the world, and many

other pieces of information. It can also track conversions from your ads and other traffic sources so you can figure

out what parts of your marketing strategy are the most effective.

Get in front of the Right Audience.

The best online marketing tools for small business are only useful if they get you in front of the right people.

If the people you’re reaching aren’t interested in your product or service, it won’t matter how good your offer is,

they’re not likely to become a paying customer.

The more places your business is found, the better. Your customers are getting more internet-savvy all the

time and many of them turn to the web first when looking for a solution to their problem.

Adding your business to the Bizzindex directory can help reach those customers. Claim your business now to

get yourself listed in our directory free of charge.